After looking through a few Google searches and not finding anything that helped me, I decided to crack open one of the laptops to see what would happen. Although it's not as easy as with a desktop computer, it's still pretty easy to swap parts out of laptops. Even though I was going in without any knowledge of laptops, I had a relatively easy time getting to the cd drives and switching 'em out. And I've now got an entire laptop's worth of spare parts, which is nice. The only problem is that both computers are over six years old, so I'd like to upgrade a few more things. My next project will be to put in a larger hard-drive (I've only got 3 gigs right now) followed by a wireless modem, and maybe a dvd drive, so I'll update this thread with my progress.

sure, laptops are not too different from regular PCs. Many things are interchangeable, but many also are not. Hard drives and CPUs are usually compatable, depending on the motherboard for the CPU. Memory is sometimes usable in other machines. Using two machines from the same manufacturer is also a good way to go.